by Jeff Ryan
Nester was fictional, hence his name, the NES-ster. Howard, though, was based on Howard Phillips, one of the American branch’s first employees. (And yes, there was a Howdy Doody quality to him.) Phillips had been the first person to think that Donkey Kong was a better game than Radar Scope. He was one of the original six who had converted the two thousand units shipped over from Jersey. During the Universal lawsuit, he flew to New York to demonstrate Donkey Kong in court. A few years later, he moved to the New York area and spent months setting up World of Nintendo displays. He helped choose which games from the hundreds of Famicon titles would be NES launch releases. His current job was to evaluate games up for review, passing on notes for changes. Most designers admitted his suggestions were right on the money. After the NES launch he had been given the official job description, on business cards and everything, of Game Master.
As a Nintendo Power editor, Phillips helped come up with the modern strategy guide. Images of each board of Super Mario Bros. were stitched together to display every obstacle and villain Mario would face, and printed small enough so a good dozen screen were included per row. The result looked like Cinerama film strips from a virtual world. The board stretched on for miles, branching off into multiple avenues, sometimes betraying when an underground jaunt didn’t correspond in length with its aboveground stretch.
This was done to help sell the games, but it had a value beyond mere marketing. The guides helped gamers through tough sequences, which not only kept them playing but showed them facets of the game that only experts would otherwise find. Strategy guides for video games now bring in over a hundred million dollars a year. In addition, every game (no matter how small) has a dozen or more fan-made walkthroughs, contributed and collected at sites like gameFAQs.com. The Mario game walkthroughs are the length of Victorian novels.
“Howard” disappeared from the strip two years into its run, replaced by just Nester. This was because Howard Phillips himself left Nintendo, poached away by LucasArts to be their games guru. Nintendo was in continual expansion, so having someone leave was almost unprecedented, especially from the job of “spokesgamer.” (It still is: Nintendo employees stay on for decades.) The coolest job at the coolest company had its downside, though: long hours; low wages—despite Nintendo literally making billions each year, it paid its employees conservatively; and poor job security. Howard Phillips had clear competition as company mascot, competition who sold millions of games every year. Nintendo’s focus was shifting from gamers (like Phillips) to games. And there just wasn’t anyone in creation who could be a worthy rival to Mario.
Since the late 1970s, Sega wasn’t so much the Pepsi to Nintendo’s Coke as it was the RC Cola. It had been Rosencrantzing and Guildensterning its way around the gaming world for decades, always buffeted by the wake of others, rarely the one making waves.
Sega began life in 1940 as Standard Games, running penny arcades on military bases in the territory of Hawaii. A decade later, under the name of Service Games, it merged with American expatriate David Rosen’s company, which was putting photo booths around Tokyo. The combined venture was called Sega Enterprises—SeGa for Service Games.
Sega was bought in 1969 by Gulf + Western, an American zaibatsu-style conglomerate parodied in the Mel Brooks film Silent Movie as Engulf + Devour. Rosen stayed on as Sega moved from electromechanical hits like Periscope to video games such as Zaxxon and 005, a James Bond knockoff. The arcade titles (including Congo Bongo, a suspiciously familiar game about an angry ape throwing things) brought in $200 million worth of quarters over the years. But Sega also tried its hand at some home consoles—1981’s SG-1000 and a cheapo sequel a few years later. Gulf + Western dropped Sega like a hot potato in 1983, thinking that gaming was a bubble that had just burst.
Sega’s third console was the Mark III, which it quickly renamed the Master System. Its merits were dubious: it was backward compatible with two previous game systems no one knew about; it could accept cards or cartridge-based games; its mascot was an egg-shaped spaceship name Opa-Opa. When Opa-Opa flopped as a character, Sega replaced the spaceship with Alex Kidd, a monkey boy whose dull, difficult, different adventures (in subsequent games he fights ninjas, then playing cards, then fights a boss called Mari-Oh [!], then is a BMX rider) gave him little identity. Alex was a winded rival’s sad attempt to “make” a Mario by plopping the same character in radically divergent games.
Then, like the dawning of a new day, came the Genesis. Called the Mega Drive in Japan when it was released in 1988, it was a 16-bit system, allowing for exponentially better graphics, sound, and—most crucially—speed. More than sixty possible colors, eighty movable sprites on screen at a time, and a resolution rate that was actually slowed so that the processor could have more juice for faster animation.
Any 1988 console would (and should) be leaps and bounds better than the NES, which was five years old. The paradox of launching a game system was how to attract third-party support when they would only make games for a system with a big install base . . . which of course would only happen with third-party support. Sega was having little luck attracting vendors to design for their great machine. Nintendo had inserted exclusivity clauses for all of its third-party designers, to starve any possible competitor. If they released a Genesis game, they’d be breaching their contract.
Furthermore, Nintendo wouldn’t let companies make their own products: everything was made by Nintendo, to further its control of distribution. This micromanagement came to a head during a chip shortage in Japan, where Nintendo both slashed orders down to a fraction of their size and forbade companies from finding their own U.S. or European chips. Those who complained could see their chip allotment cut further, and fewer mentions in Nintendo Power. Making your business partners codependently kiss your ring in exchange for such paltry treatment was a recipe for misery, and game makers no doubt hoped Sega would offer an escape hatch from the draconian Nintendo.
The Genesis sold for $189, nearly double the NES price. It was backwards compatible with the Master System, not much of a feature since few in America had one. In Japan, it wasn’t doing particularly well: it was third, behind the NES and then NEC’s Turbo-Grafx 16. The TG-16 was very popular in Japan—it had a 16-bit graphics chip before the Genesis did—but it cheated with an 8-bit microprocessor and wasn’t as robust a machine. Still, Nintendo’s and NEC’s market advantage of being there first and building a customer base shut Sega out. (The Genesis and the TG-16 launched in the United States around the same time: the Genesis’s superior games would essentially end NEC’s chance of American success. It ranked a distant fourth in the U.S. market.)
Sega made bold moves to win over American audiences, which in toto would achieve so much success that any claims of Nintendo’s coercive monopoly would crumble. It allied with Tonka to distribute its systems. It called out Nintendo by name in its ads, running sideby-side pictures that Sega’s Japanese exec thought were in bad taste. It made its own series of sports games, paying out millions to the biggest names in the field—Joe Montana, Tommy Lasorda, Arnold Palmer, Pat Riley, and (in a possible bid for industrial sabotage) hockey’s Super Mario Lemieux—for their names and likenesses. (Nintendo had stayed far away from athlete licensing ever since Mike Tyson was accused of spousal abuse.) It lured computer game giant Electronic Arts, which Nintendo had never hired, to make Genesis games. Sega even hired the King of Pop, Michael Jackson, for a beat-em-up called Moonwalker. It happily sold its games to Blockbuster.
And, in 1991, it unleashed its Sonic boom. Sonic the Hedgehog was a new genre of game, a mix of racing game and platformer. Sonic’s goal was ostensibly the same as Mario’s: trek from one end of the world to the other, while picking up all the goodies. But while Mario’s focus was on replaying each level until all the treasures were found, Sonic’s was on lightning-quick reflexes and the adrenaline rush of caroming up hills, through loop-de-loops, around lateral twists, and then banging into pinball bumpers to do it all again backward. Sonic used only on
e button, jump. This was done to simplify game play—Mario and his wardrobe of costumes seemed baroque by comparison. Even Sonic’s jump was literally sharp. He spun into a quill-lined ball to bowl over others. Each impact with an opponent presumably left them covered in barbs.
Sonic’s creator, his Miyamoto, was Yuji Naka. Naka was young: he had been in high school during the crash of ’83. He was from Osaka, and had grown up a generation removed from the war. He spoke fluent English, but loved Japanese synth-pop. He was handsome. Figuring he’d learn more with on-the-job training, he never went to college, and talked his way into Sega as a programmer. He had cut his teeth on the Phantasy Star line of role-playing games, which were easily among the Master System’s best. He had a hard time managing staff, preferring to do everything himself. For fun, and to show off, he built an NES emulator for the Master System.
Sonic was different: he was the poster child for the ADHD generation, an anime speedster with spiky hair, a constant smirk, and what in retrospect would be the defining hallmark of the nascent 1990s: “attitude.” He looked like Mickey Mouse channeling Sid Vicious, or Felix the Cat as a base jumper. Sonic’s finger waggled at you from the title screen, like he was on The Jerry Springer Show (which also premiered in 1991). If you left the controller idle while playing, he impatiently tapped his feet. As a character, he was expressly built to showcase Nintendo’s weaknesses. Mario was jolly: Sonic was rude. Mario was happily unrushed: Sonic’s express purpose was to rush. Mario changed into lots of clever outfits. Sonic didn’t have to change: he was as ruthlessly perfect as a shark.
This was new for Nintendo. Plenty of people had made inferior side-scrolling platform adventures. They were fan fiction at best, people who didn’t understand what made Mario tick trying to duplicate his efforts. Naka’s Sonic was a four-fingered glove across Nintendo’s cheek. He cast all of Nintendo’s positives as negatives. Affordability and creativity became inferiority and impotence. Nintendo was popular? Well, as the middle-school logic goes, it’s not cool anymore if everyone likes it. If Nintendo was the jovial uncle Mario happy to play with the kids, then the Genesis was the rebellious teen cousin Sonic who drove too fast and snuck cigarettes.
This argument between corporate mascots is, of course, risible. Sega and Nintendo were in the same business, operating under the same rules. Corporate philosophy may drive a board of directors’ meeting, but for the designers trying to digitally paint a background or map out some extra processing power, it was academic. Yet this was a serious issue for the young consumer. Mario was lame and Sonic was cool, went the new social paradigm. You could still play a Mario game, just like you could go pick flowers for your mom if you wanted. At school you pretended you were allowed to stay up late to watch the overtime, you said you loved all the hit new music, and you praised Sonic for being def and rad and bitchin’.
Worst of all for Nintendo was, appropriately, Sonic’s speed. From its launch day on June 23, Sonic was the Genesis’ new pack-in game. Anyone who recently bought a Genesis with Altered Beast packed in could receive a free Sonic. Sega even retrofitted a version to play on the Master System. Sonic soon appeared in a hit series of cartoons, comic books, and all the merchandise that went in between. Sega dropped the Genesis’s price to $150, and set up a domestic gaming division to makes games for American audiences. After fifty years in the gaming business, Sega was an enfant terrible.
Nintendo hadn’t had an easy climb to the top, but once it was there it continued to act like a team down by fourteen, instead of up by twenty-one. (Psych journals have reported on this “overdog” effect, showing that teams work harder when they have more face to lose.) It made toy stores, who usually had a “December 12” policy of not having to pay for any shipments until well into the Christmas season, pay up-front for everything. It continued to manufacture all cartridges, putting third-party vendors at Nintendo’s mercy during parts shortages. It set up its own divisions in the United Kingdom and Canada. It went after rental companies like Blockbuster. It attacked Taiwainese software pirates. For all the billions it was bringing in, it took almost no risks. Such was the benefit of controlling the distribution.
Sega found a way to challenge Nintendo despite not having available third-party support, or an established fan base, or known brands. Sonic wasn’t a perfect game—it was very short, and too easy. But pointing that out in public would be treating them as equals, which played into Sonic’s and Sega’s game. For Pete’s sake, Paul McCartney was just in Japan, and he passed up a visit to Mount Fuji to meet Shigeru Miyamoto. Any Beatles stopping by Sega headquarters? “Sega is nothing,” Yamauchi said to a reporter, a quote that ended up pasted onto many Sega employees’ doors.
Minoru Arakawa’s strategy to fight Sonic, then, was to do little other than cross his fingers that Sega went bankrupt. Mario licensing was big: the first of a dozen Nintendo Adventure books had just hit bookstores, featuring choose-your-own-adventure style adventures for Mario. Nintendo already had its new 16-bit console in development. It would be foolish to rush it to market too early, or to launch in the United States and Japan simultaneously: Japan was the acid test for gaming. (One that Sega failed, incidentally.)
But maybe they could gin up a new Mario game, a sort of hail Mario pass. Gunpei Yokoi’s team had designed an excellent Game Boy puzzle title, which built on the success of Tetris. The screen starts out full of blocks in one of three hues, and the player has to drop two-block units down to clear the rows. It played like starting a half-lost game of Tetris. And, it was a Mario game. The game field was a bottle, the blocks were viruses, and Mario had to drop “pills” to clear the board. It was closer to waste management than medicine, but Garbage Man Mario didn’t have a good ring to it. Dr. Mario did, though. And since its graphic needs were so basic, quality versions could be made for the NES, Game Boy, and the arcade. (Where one of the big hits of the year was Sega’s own puzzle game, Columns.)
Dr. Mario did quite well, selling more than five million copies, further establishing the puzzle genre as a viable field. Tetris had given gamers a jones for puzzle games. And while great ones were hard to make, imperfect ones practically grew on trees. For the Game Boy especially, it seemed half of all the new games released were puzzle games: Boxxle, Pipe Dream, Qix. But only a few had the simplicity of game play and design to be intuitive: Dr. Mario, Tetris, and Columns. (In fact, Nintendo released a combo cartridge called Tetris & Dr. Mario.)
Another Dr. Mario accomplishment was to upgrade Mario to the star of a game that had nothing to do with Mario’s wheelhouse of jumping, costumes, turtles, saving princesses from King Koopa, etc. It was a puzzle game, pure and simple. Having Mario be in it was fine—discovering him in a Nintendo game was like finding the Alfred Hitchcock cameo, or searching out the word Nina in an Al Hirschfeld drawing. But to name the game after him? Who would see the word “Mario” and think “puzzle game”?
Dr. Mario wasn’t phoned in, and Nintendo felt its quality earned the right to have Mario on the cover. Mario was a celebrity endorser, Michael Jordan in overalls. While Sega was building its mascot Sonic with mercenary aplomb, Nintendo turned Mario into the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.
Sonic’s rebellious attitude apparently wasn’t a whole-cloth invention from Yuji Naka. He cut ties with Sega’s Japanese headquarters—he wasn’t being paid what he deserved, he said—and went to work for one of Sega’s new U.S. divisions. He brought a slew of Japanese designers with him; the development team was a little bit of Tokyo in the heart of Los Angeles. It was as if Naka couldn’t stay, but didn’t really want to leave, either. There is a philosophical term invented by Schopenhauer for being equally hurt by staying too close or staying too far away. It is called the hedgehog’s dilemma—think prickly animals needing to huddle together for body heat.
Naka continued working on more Sonic games, eventually weaving in a supporting cast—Tails the fox, Knuckles the Echidna, another hedgehog named Amy Rose—that reinforced Sonic’s bad-boy image. Amy Rose pined for Soni
c—but he was too busy to ever notice. Tails looked up to Sonic like a younger sibling. Knuckles was Sonic’s bitter rival. All existed to smartly shine Sonic’s rising star, and make him the centerpiece of the game.
Mario, on the other hand, didn’t need a crew of characters who all said how awesome he was. He was kept purposefully mute, a mere avatar for the audience, his specificity of look and demeanor making him that much more universal. Nintendo would not change its actions just because a competitor had finally made some grounds in terms of market share.
Besides, the next Mario game in the pipeline would crush Sega.
PART 3
SWEET 16
11 – MARIO’S CLASH
THE SONIC-MARIO SHOWDOWN
The man behind the Nintendo Entertainment System was Masayuki Uemura. Uemura had grown up in Japan’s poor postwar years without much money. He taught himself engineering, and successfully built a remote-controlled airplane from bits of scrap he found in a junkyard. This skill led him to study electrical engineering in college, and then to work for Sharp with the new technology of solar cells. He specialized in optical semiconductors, which were the infrastructure of the power source.
Part of Uemura’s job was explaining this new technology to potential clients. One day around 1971, Sharp sent him, with his thatch of thick hair parted evenly over a growing forehead, to a potential client in Kyoto. It was a toy and card manufacturer named Nintendo. Uemura and one of Nintendo’s engineers, Gunpei Yokoi, hit it off, as only two grown men still interested in designing toys can. Yokoi’s knack for finding the fun in everything, combined with Uemura’s knowledge of the solar cells, could bear fruit.
Or it could bear arms. This solar-cell technology could be used for a light gun game. Shooting a light gun at a sheet of such cells would light up only the one that was hit. It’d be as direct as pushing a button on a calculator. But it would require a whole screen of photodiodes, which was impractical.
